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UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
- VoidWhisperer 9mo agoOne thing that is unclear to me from the article: Is the idea that it will manufacture all of these chips and then both the 'factory' and the resulting materials will return from space, or that the factory would stay in orbit and send materials back?
- dogma1138 9mo agoReturn.
- coldtea 9mo agoJust a tiny part of the operation will happen in space. The result of that will return, then will be made into chips on earth.
- ahazred8ta 9mo agoThe idea is that the furnace will melt the silicon into a 'boule' (cylinder). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(crystal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(crystal)> The solid boule will be returned to Earth for lab analysis.
- skippyboxedhero 9mo agoThe idea is that they get government funding from credulous civil servants. There is no actual idea here, there is no business. The idea that a country that is unable to supply basic infrastructure is suddenly going to build CPUs in space is obvious bullshit.
- Squeeze2664 9mo agoI'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you would even consider doing it in space in the first place is because, on Earth, gravity and other forces are stronger and result in lower-purity crystals. Basically, what I'm getting at, is that I believe this is pretty much a glorified oven. Moving the entire manufacturing process in space wouldn't make sense, as I don't think the benefits to other steps of the process like CVD would outweigh the insane costs of sending things into orbit.
- HPsquared 9mo agoIn a way that's good because they don't need logistics for the entire supply and production chain up there, they can just drop the (small and presumably valuable) silicon crystals back to Earth.
- dentalnanobot 9mo agoSilicon ingots used in chip manufacturing aren’t that small: like a ~400mm diameter cylinder a metre or so long, and from memory several hundred kilos.
- HPsquared 9mo agoLooking up their website, it sounds like the company are making only the seed crystal in space, not the entire silicon boule: "Space Forge is using space-derived crystal seeds to grow ultra-high quality semiconductor substrates on Earth." https://www.spaceforge.com/ https://www.spaceforge.com/
- guepe 9mo agoNote that growing ingots is an incredible feat at that purity and size that they achieve on earth. It’s already a very very hard step in a crazy process for entire chip manufacturing.
- RobotToaster 9mo agoLeaving aside the small issue of getting there, wouldn't it be easier to achieve in space given there is fewer impurities like air floating around?
- stevenwoo 9mo agoEven given that the sending finished products back to earth in same clean room conditions for next step seems challenging to make profitable. If it’s a proof of concept, okay, but to take it further the lithography step takes RV sized machines.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- tomatotomato37 9mo agoI'm curious what the thermal management system on this looks like. On one hand, vacuum being in essence a perfect insulator works in favor of keeping the silicon hot for the very long time it takes to pull a boule while requiring very little energy. On the other hand, you have to make sure the control electronics don't also heat up to 1000C. I'm also curious how you keep the molten silion separate from the crystal without gravity keeping it in the crucible. I bet a lot of interesting engineering going on here.
- HPsquared 9mo agoSomething like a vacuum flask, I imagine. Vacuum is a very good insulator already and you minimise radiative heat transfer (infrared glow) by making a surface shiny and metallic usually (low emissivity)
- jstanley 9mo agoIf you have to bring your own vacuum flask, don't you lose half the benefit of doing it in space?
- rokkamokka 9mo agoIsn't the primary benefit the lack of gravity?
- imtringued 9mo agoYou can reduce metals through vacuum pyrolysis at much lower temperatures without a reducing agent if you have a vacuum. This could make industrial scale processing of steel relatively easy on the moon.
- pfdietz 9mo agoReducing ferric oxide to magnetite, perhaps, but I think if you tried that with ferrous oxide you'd get iron vapor coming off along with the oxygen. An issue with any high temperature process is things start evaporating. This is part of why carbothermal reduction of aluminum oxide doesn't work: at the required temperature aluminum oxide is volatile. (There are thermochemical water splitting technologies that exploit partially reducing transition or rare earth oxides at high temperature, then reacting them with steam at a bit lower temperature to make hydrogen. I believe cerium oxides are the current best approach there, although still not competitive.)
- crote 9mo ago> "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. > "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." Okay, but, we have 5G towers, car chargers, and planes right now? I understand that purer material is better, but to what extent are the impurities of current wafer production methods limiting us? Why is shooting the furnace into space the best option? Why is making wafers 4+ orders of magnitude more expensive the solution we should go for?
- zwischenzug 9mo ago[flagged]
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoThere is no reason to do it with current processes. It could possibly reduce defect rate/increase yields but I'm not sure impurities are even leading cause now. But we might discover other uses, that's what science is.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoNo way. This is being done because there’s a predictable path to profitability. It’s not just random shot in the dark science you can sometimes see in academia. It’s just this path isn’t clear to us laymen… I know because launching into space isn’t something that will be done just for science
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoHubble Space Telescope. James Webb Space Telescope.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoI should’ve specified corporate vs. academia. Those telescopes clearly aren’t corporate. More akin to academia. Corporations won’t go to space just for “science” and that is the case here.
- georgefrowny 9mo ago4000 times purer seems a questionable claim to me. 4000 times purer then what? Current Earthbound state of the art? A guy in shed with a vacuum pump and a heater? On what axis: crystal defects or contamination? High vacuums aren't at all impossible on Earth and silicon boules are already single crystals. What exactly about their process permits such a huge quality improvement?
- fsh 9mo agoThe best silicon single crystals still contain impurities at the 1E-11 level. This project is about doing crystal growing in low gravity (the ultra-high purity is only achieved due to the growth process). The vacuum of space is a lot worse than what can be achieved in the lab, especially in low orbits.
- boothby 9mo agoWhat I'm struggling with is the hard radiation, which causes defects and even impurities even if you start with isotopically pure feedstock
- jsbisviewtiful 9mo agoI had a similar thought regarding radiation - but also curious about cost to continuously launch materials and the overall reliability of recovery. Just seems like a lot of "what ifs" for the sake of finding funding.
- twic 9mo agoThere have been experiments to create higher vacuums in space, which have been used to grow semiconductor crystals: https://scfh.ru/en/papers/vacuum-in-the-wake/ https://scfh.ru/en/papers/vacuum-in-the-wake/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility I'm not saying it's practical, but it's pretty cool.
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo agoWhat is the current defect rate preventing from happening? If you can lower it three orders of magnitude, what then becomes possible?
- metalman 9mo agoI think that this is far from the first experiment in growing crystals in space, so they must have good evidence for what properties to expect from single crystal silicon grown in space, my guess is that the purity is not so much which elements are or are not included, but more the perfection of the physical crystaline structure, which may introduce the posibility of the crystal having different characteristics in different planes that can be exploited for various purposes.
- georgefrowny 9mo agoThe crystal planes indeed do have different properties which are exploited already. Some planes have better flatness and defect rates then others, and etching rates and undercutting varies according to the surface orientation and the orientation of long thin details to the bulk lattice. Silicon boules are grown with defined orientations. There's a system of flat edges ground into the wafers which indicate the orientation.
- actionfromafar 9mo agoUK - the only country to achieve to-orbit capability only to shelve it after the first flight.
- fsh 9mo agoAs an ESA member state, the UK has had launch capabilities via Arianespace for a couple of decades.
- rsynnott 9mo agoFrance essentially did that too, in favour of the ESA (I think the French launcher may have had a couple launches, but certainly no more than ten).
- etiennebausson 9mo agoFrance has its own agency, the CNES (though most research go through ESA nowaday), and had it for a long time. Its launchers are still the best when it comes to reliability I believe, though not competitive on cost anymore since the advent of spaceX (Ariane6's first flight was in 2024 and its price per kilogram is just an order of magnitude worse than spaceX). Definitely missed a step. Still, France has an active and ongoing space program since about 1970.
- rsynnott 9mo agoThe Ariane family is, at least formally, ESA, not CNES, tho. The UK also has its own agency, but launches via ESA (or private). I think it would be probably fair to say that Ariane is more French than anything else, but it’s not strictly a French project. Confusingly, the EU also has its own agency, though it doesn’t, as far as I can see, do much outside of operating Galileo. ESA, though obviously very EU aligned, isn’t an EU agency, and has non-EU/EEA/former-EU members (notably, _Canada_).
- sandworm101 9mo agoUm... i see some red flags. This test to heat gasses in a furnace looks a little sus. It is basically a micowave oven ... in space!! My kitchen microwave can hit 1000c. Let styropyro at it and it could probably do 10,000c. Then i came across this gem on thier website. >> Radiators facing cold space can freely produce temperatures near absolute zero for ultra-fast curing without the need for cryogenics. https://www.spaceforge.com/ https://www.spaceforge.com/ I dont see a path to a product. I see a company farming investment and government programs with overhyped "experiments" that have been already done many times. They even talk about testing a heat shield for reentry as if that tech is somehow new. Want to bring samples back? Send your microwave to the space station and bring them back like everyone else.
- MomsAVoxell 9mo agoThis is really, really exciting. The moment this spark ignites, it will herald a new reality for industrialization of space, and I for one cannot wait to see it succeed. One of the things I truly believe will elevate our species is space industrialization. If, in 20 years or so, we send a fleet of space furnaces to 16 Psyche [1], there is a very real possibility that we will be able to move a lot of Earths heavy industrial processes to space. Can you imagine - 3D printed Starship hulls being made from the immense resources of 16 Psyche? Literal pallets of iPhones being landed from near earth orbit. It sounds like whacky science fiction now, and for now it really is just that, but the launch and successful mission of Space Forge and other companies like it bring us all a single step closer to seeing that reality play out. I truly hope we can survive long enough to move heavy metal industry to space, and use that event to return the Earth to a garden state. It’s a long shot, but oh what a beautiful world it would be in 100 years time if this dream can be kept alive, and actually achieved. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche
- marcosdumay 9mo agoResearch has gone this direction several times. Every time it did, ground factories discover some way to improve their quality so that space manufacturing became irrelevant again. That's not to say it will happen again. But it's not a certain thing.
- MomsAVoxell 9mo agoWins at both ends, whats to not like?
- thayne 9mo ago> a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. Why bring back the entire spacecraft and not just the finished product? I'm also curious how they handle cooling the silicon, since dissipating heat in space is kind of difficult.
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo agoHarder engineering to separate the components? Making the oven + crystal formation work is probably maxing out their novelty budget without trying to make the craft partially disassemble. Plus, they can study the oven after the process which is likely to be helpful if the entire experiment poops the bed.
- rdiddly 9mo ago"This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." LOL! Talk about an anticlimax. Either this is a lack of imagination on the CEO's part, or he's dumbing it down for us, or that level of silicon purity/regularity, is one of those nice-sounding but impractical Platonic ideals that ends up being kind of a waste. But it, and/or solving the attendant problems, might be an important precursor for some future innovation.
- golem14 9mo agoThis is a microwave oven. I wonder how feasible is to have a solar concentrator, if you can build it out of foil, mostly, like a light sail. You would have to 1) keep turning it toward the sun and b) reduce time in earth's shadow, which means a polar orbit?
- anthk 9mo agoThis is incredible, the huge temperature shifts often create either metal damage or explosions because of instant stretching.